Valgeir Sigurðsson

Aaron Gonsher

Thank you for joining us today, everyone. If you’re in the room right now, then I’m sure you know who the person who is joining us today is. But just in case you do not, he is a composer, a producer, an engineer, who has spent the last 20 years releasing and making music that consistently challenges perceptions and genre boundaries. His home base is here in Iceland, at the Greenhouse Studios. Please join me in welcoming Valgeir Sigurðsson.

We have a lot of music to discuss, because you’ve had a very extensive career. But before we start to talk about some of the music that you’ve made, I’d like to play something that I understand was particularly transformative for you as a listener, in setting you on your musical path today. And it might be a little bit unexpected for people, but let’s take a listen to this song.

(music: Prince – “When Doves Cry” / applause)

So, that was obviously Prince, “When Doves Cry.” Can you take me back to the first time that you heard that song, and maybe explain why it was so transformative for you?

valgeir sigurðsson

I think I heard it first in the film Purple Rain. And that was sort of my introduction to Prince, when I was maybe 13. And that was a time in my life where I had been studying electric guitar and playing electric guitar and playing, like, rock and punk music. And starting to get more interested in electronics and electronic music and music production. And I remember seeing that film, and seeing the musicians use drum machines onstage, and guitars, and everything in combination. And I remember there was a sequence in the film where Prince is writing a piece of music and just, in an angry moment or something, turns on a drum machine and just plays along. And I was like, “Shit, you don’t need a drummer.” So I think that was one of the things that... I mean, I’ve watched that film maybe a million times, and every little detail about it I was kind of obsessed with at that time in my life. And I picked this song, I think, as one, I could have picked any from that record. Because, you know, I lived it, basically. And it was different to a lot of the music that I had been listening to, I guess, up till that point.

Aaron Gonsher

What had your musical references been, separately? As a guitarist and just as a listener as well.

valgeir sigurðsson

Yeah, well, that was also a... Before that, it was more straight rock, with the guitars. The Clash and Sex Pistols were a big favorite of mine. And that was kind of the music that I had been trying to play, as a nine and ten year old. And then opening my ears to bands like Japan and Talk Talk, who were using more synths, and the New Romantic electronic music of the ’80s coming in.

Aaron Gonsher

At the time that you were studying music, and playing guitar, did it mean anything to you that Prince was not only the guitarist but the composer and the mixer and the engineer, was basically this one-man band? What did that mean to you as something that potentially gave you the idea of what you could aspire to in multiple roles in music? As opposed to being limited to just one?

valgeir sigurðsson

Yeah, that actually was a big part of why I think I was attracted to this film and this way of music-making, with people and with machines. And growing up where I did grow up, in the north of Iceland, with about a thousand people living there, I didn’t have musicians to play with a lot of the time. The technology was very new at the time and not so accessible as it is today, obviously. I wanted to play the guitar as an instrument, but I knew that I wouldn’t necessarily want to be a guitar player. But I wanted to make music. So at the time, I was starting to understand that producing music in the studio would be a way to do things that wouldn’t limit one to be in a band, and just being in that role of the guitarist, or a specific corner, you know. And being able to write and produce in your bedroom almost, you know, that was a very attractive idea for me.

Aaron Gonsher

Do you remember what your earliest set-up might have been? When you actually started to produce music on your own, before you actually went to study.

valgeir sigurðsson

Yeah. I started buying a Roland drum machine, I remember. It was a 707. And then I got another Roland keyboard. It was a JX-03 that I actually still have today. I don’t have the 707. But those machines were with the guitar I was using. Actually before that, I had a neighbor who had a home organ with preset drums. And I took a tape machine over and recorded the drums from the rock, bossa nova, samba, jazz. At three different tempos. So I could play along to them. So that was before I was able to buy a drum machine. A way to kind of have that at hand. So I was kind of playing around the tape and recording.

Aaron Gonsher

At what point did you take this informal education and interest into a more formal realm, and start to study engineering? Was it in London?

valgeir sigurðsson

Yeah. When I moved to Reykjavík when I was about 15, and then I started studying classical guitar as well, around the same time. And my interest had also kind of opened for classical music. Also, having a sister who was playing the piano and playing classical pieces, I was intrigued by that music. That was my first exposure to classical music.

And then the engineering, I saw an ad in the paper one day. And it said, “Free studio time. Come and record your demo.” So I went. And I had been writing songs in my room, and went to this small basement studio that belonged to a guy who was formerly in a band and had now sort of lost interest in the studio a bit. But he was getting clients in, so you’d only have to pay him for his time. And so I did that and came out with four demos or something like that.

And then he actually started asking me... He kind of picked up on my curiosity about the studio environment. I had come to Reykjavik to study, to go on to, like, a grammar school. But I wasn’t really interested in that. So actually, I was more interested in the studio. And he picked up on this and he said, “You could come and help me out if you want.” And so I started coming to his studio. And suddenly I found myself in a place with equipment, with microphones, with a 12-track tape recorder, a mixing desk, some outboard equipment. And I could help him out, and spend the evenings making my music. And eventually, six months later or so, it had become a job. And I actually quit school to do that job.

Aaron Gonsher

And this was still in Reykjavik?

valgeir sigurðsson

This is still in Reykjavik. This is like, oh let’s see, this is ’87.

Aaron Gonsher

Is the guy still around?

valgeir sigurðsson

I think he is, but he’s not in the studio. This was his, like, getting out of the studio business, was selling me the equipment. When I was 17. And living there, basically, with the recording studio. To run and to have as my... I actually was living next door to it, so it was kind of the beginning. I’m still running Greenhouse. So this is 30 years ago. Then two years later, I actually decided that I would need to go and study a bit more formally, and live somewhere else. So I applied to go to the SAE in London, where I studied music production and engineering.

Aaron Gonsher

Separate from the actual education component of your time in London, were there any specific musical experiences that you had there in the city that you might not have had access to had you stayed in Reykjavik? In terms of things that further expand musical reference points, or something like that.

valgeir sigurðsson

Yeah, I think it’s just also a part of growing up and not just as a musical experience. Just seeing a different community, being away and learning to live on your own, and all that. It’s an important part of the education. Like learning about life, you know. I wanted to stay in London longer and try to get a job there, but that didn’t work out. So I ended up coming back. And I had sold the equipment, so it was kind of a transition for me. I had been able to kind of support myself with the studio work. Doing, like, editing radio commercials and doing band demos and this and that. And writing my own music, kind of, in my spare time. Playing with friends. But I think it’s... It was a really important time for me, to go away and come back. Just how you kind of see the place that you’re from in a different perspective when you return. And when you’re away, you know. You appreciate the things, maybe, that you forget about when you’re in the middle of it.

Aaron Gonsher

So would you say that the lessons from this time spent studying music were not actually as important for you? In terms of what they were teaching you about the gear, or the electronics, or the process. It was more about creating this mindset, of you having this sort of musical life?

valgeir sigurðsson

Yeah. I agree with that. I think that I was slightly underwhelmed with the course because the amount of practical studio time was quite limited. And it was in the day where access to a... There were a few computers in the school, but there was one main control room, and you kind of had to book it out months in advance. And then you had to find people to bring into the studio. So there wasn’t really... I mean, kind of in retrospect, you learn survival, so you just have to make the best of it that you can. But I think the overall experience was very positive and useful. Nothing was kind of handed to you. You had to figure it out.

Aaron Gonsher

And then you came back to Iceland, you were playing in bands. At what point did you decide to create Greenhouse, where you’re still working today? Because it sounds like it was partially in reaction to these experiences that you had, but also building upon the positive.

valgeir sigurðsson

Yes, I think that it stayed with me, having access to the equipment. And I had kept some of the equipment, mostly the instruments and the things that I could carry with me. You know, going into studios for every project was not something that I liked. I missed having the access to, and being able to invite people to come and use the space and collaborate. So I started getting, like collecting more gear, a bit more deliberately, and having a little set-up that enabled me to eventually get a space and get a bit more serious about it. Because this is, again... I don’t know if everybody remembers the time before computers. We’re so used to it now. But it was much more of a thing, you know, to get a dedicated tape recorder. Not a machine that does everything, your email and everything else and you make music on it as well.

I was kind of slow to get into computers, because they always felt very counterproductive to me. Like, they didn’t move as fast as I wanted them to move. They didn’t have any memory. You think so much faster than they react to. Whereas now they’re starting to become good tools. So collecting the gear and setting up a space was something that I wanted to do again.

Aaron Gonsher

When the first people were coming out to Greenhouse, I guess at that time you were mainly producing other people’s work.

valgeir sigurðsson

Mm-hmm.

Aaron Gonsher

Do you remember what the reaction was to the space? Being the type of studio that it is, in the location that it is.

valgeir sigurðsson

Yeah. It wasn’t in the location it was in, the space, from the beginning. I started in a slightly more humble setting. The equipment was very, like, collected from here and there, in a makeshift sort of space, in an industrial park. And the name Greenhouse actually comes from that sort of idea of having a greenhouse of ideas in this kind of concrete landscape. Whereas the Greenhouse, where it is today and has been for the last 18 years, is in a very green area. But the reaction, people were just happy to come to a space where they could make noise and record and have a good quality outcome. And it was sort of more about those connections than necessarily about the gear, or about the space.

Aaron Gonsher

Greenhouse was founded in 1997. In the first location. And then, in 2006 was the first record that came out on Bedroom Community. What was happening in your musical life during that ten-year span, basically, that led you to the moment of deciding to found the label? Separate from any sort of, you know, meeting Nico [Muhly] or Ben [Frost]. I’m curious about the musical progression during that time that made it seem sensible.

valgeir sigurðsson

Well, before starting Greenhouse in the beginning, I had been playing with a few different bands and different local acts that toured a bit and had records out. So kind of learning about it from that side as well, being as only a keyboard player in a band and touring. And then being the one who would kind of produce the recording if I can, or engineer it. And then those collaborations kind of led to the studio coming together as a space. And then, in the beginning I was working quite a lot with the Bad Taste label, Smekkleysa, who would always ask me, occasionally, to do a project. It was a group of people who had kind of similar interests in music-making, I guess. What was the question? [laughs]

Aaron Gonsher

Why was it suddenly a good idea to have the label, in 2006, if it didn’t seem like such a good idea in 2003, or 2000, or in 1987 when you first started?

valgeir sigurðsson

Right. Well, I didn’t start thinking about the label until... Well, I guess I started thinking about it in the early 2000s. I had sometimes come across projects that I wanted to be involved with that didn’t have a label. So in the end, it was like, “Well, we can’t really put all this effort into it if nobody’s going to hear it. It seems a little bit wrong to do that.” My instinct is usually to just figure things out and to do them, rather than try to find, for example, the right label for each project. I thought when I wanted to get my own music released, I should just release it myself. So that’s where I started seriously thinking about having a label, because I had the studio. I had the infrastructure to make the records and the ideas to make the music. But, I don’t know, it’s kind of where I come from, like this do-it-yourself way of thinking.

Aaron Gonsher

I actually want to play an excerpt of something from the very first release on Bedroom Community. It’s 12 minutes long, so we’re not going to listen to the entire thing, but this is an excerpt of Nico Muhly’s “Keep in Touch.” This is on Speaks Volumes, which it was the first release, yes?

(music: Nico Muhly — “Keep in Touch”)

That was the last five minutes of “Keep in Touch.” If you haven’t heard it, go listen to the full album. You produced that for Nico.

valgeir sigurðsson

Mm-hmm.

Aaron Gonsher

And I guess there’s sort of a funny story I’ve read of Nico describing you wanting to produce that record based off of how terrible it sounded when he first sent it to you.

valgeir sigurðsson

Yeah, no, he sent me... When we were starting to get to know each other, he was this assistant to Philip Glass in the Looking Glass studio, which is his former headquarters in New York, and I was working there as well. He was sort of sneaking around and we started talking, and I asked him to send me some of his music because he talked about it. He sent me these recordings, apologizing for them being recorded just with one microphone somewhere in the ceiling in a performance. I was like, “Yeah. This is great music, but we can’t have it sounding like this. It deserves better than this.” He was immediately into the idea that we would just do it and make a good version of these pieces.

Aaron Gonsher

Separate from just improving that particular release, when you were listening to other modern classical music, did you have an idea in your head of how you wanted to change the way it was produced and presented?

valgeir sigurðsson

I don’t know if I listened to music or look at things always with the idea of how I wanted to chang them, but I did have an idea of how I might want to do it. Not necessarily like I want to do new music, but with this particular record, I thought, recording these classical instruments in a way that we kind of approached them in pop or rock music would not be a sin to try it.

Aaron Gonsher

Can you break down what that means for people who might not know the difference between the typical recording?

valgeir sigurðsson

Exactly. So what is the traditional way of recording tends to be like you have big group of people playing, but maybe three or six microphones or something. You’re trying to capture the room as if it were a live performance, so you try to optimize the space that you’re playing in. You do it really quickly and you try to edit together a few good takes, and that’s it. The other way to do it is to go into the studio and map out the piece, layer it instrument by instrument sometimes, and take a lot of care with how you place the mics and how you treat each recording.

In my case, at this time, I had been getting very much interested in getting a lot closer to the source of the sound than traditionally you would get a room recording. So I was exploring a lot of very extreme close mic-ing; rather than recording things on a stereo, overhead pair, would record them with one mic like this close and another one up there. Then I would balance it to sound like something that I was hearing, and to get maybe some nuances that I was missing.

In this piece that we heard, “Keep In Touch,” it was actually recorded, a lot of the percussion elements are from the viola, some sampled sounds of her doing stuff to the viola you’re not supposed to do. So that’s Nadia Sirota, and that’s the first time we recorded together. I found that how... I wasn’t used to maybe classical, people coming from the classical world, being that excited and open to that experimentation process. They’re always trained to conceal the imperfections of their instruments, and you play into a beautiful-sounding space hoping that nobody will hear the scratchy sounds of the strings, whereas there we would go and amplify those sounds.

Aaron Gonsher

Even though they’re all sonically different, I think there’s a really strong connection between those first three releases on Bedroom Community, which was the one we just listened to, Speaks Volumes, Ben Frost and then your own, Ekvílíbrium. But they are definitely not in the same genre of music. So what do you think is the uniting factor for this music, if there would be something separate from genre? Because I think they’re really... Yhey are sort of too connected to feel like they’re completely disparate.

valgeir sigurðsson

I think there’s some kind of an aesthetic that we shared at the time and still probably do that filtered through. And the fact that they’re recorded and mixed in the same space, we’re all kind of involved in them in some way, even though in very different capacities of course. I felt that there was a strong connection between the way the three of us approached our music-making, and I felt that it worked perfectly together as the first three releases on the same label. I think that’s as far as I can go in explaining what it is. It was just a feeling.

Aaron Gonsher

How much of the way that you approach music-making has changed from your first solo release to now?

valgeir sigurðsson

I think it has changed a lot probably. Yeah.

Aaron Gonsher

I’m curious, are you writing on the same instruments as you were then? Is your notation process completely different?

valgeir sigurðsson

It’s funny that actually I feel like almost everything before Bedroom Community was an exercise. I feel like it was education almost, like maybe setting up Bedroom Community, starting that, my own... It was like my graduation, like my thesis or something. My big project and now life happens, now you’re on your own and now it’s the real life, the real world. I think that it’s changed in ways that maybe I think I approach projects in maybe a slightly more relaxed way and I’ve matured, I hope, both as a composer and as someone who guides other people through their process. I definitely spend less time in the studio than I used to. I think about music probably more than I used to. I don’t know if that makes sense.

There’s always something going on, but I’m physically less there. Because I think I know, I go quicker through it maybe. Not to say that I always know what I’m going for, or there’s not experimentation anymore. Not at all. I think that still a big part of my process is sitting and trying, editing. I work a lot with reduction... I pile a lot of stuff in and then I spend a lot of time sifting through it and just taking it apart and putting it back together and throwing out stuff and cleaning it up. The rest of the composition happens pretty fluidly and rapidly. Yeah, that’s probably just development. I don’t know if I can put my finger on a shift from that. It’s just a gradual.

Aaron Gonsher

You’ve also had to write music that was commissioned by other people. I guess your second and your third albums were both created with a different work in mind initially. What sort of challenges does that present to have to fit your music to some other entity entirely? I guess it was a ballet for the third, and a film for the second, or vice-versa?

valgeir sigurðsson

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you’re right. Yeah. They’re different projects, and there are different challenges actually in each case. For me, the positive is having almost someone else waiting for the music to happen and it being contextualized in some way and there being a concept to the music. Architecture Of Loss, this dance piece by Stephen Petronio and his dance company, all I had for that was the title. He gave me the title, and then I could run with it. We discussed basically what that title meant to me, what it meant to him, what he thought about when he thought about those words put together.

Aaron Gonsher

So he was going to create a dance piece that was however long your music was, just based off of that title? Or was there more restrictions in place?

valgeir sigurðsson

No, the length was actually, was supposed to be about maximum 40 minutes. That’s just the program that he had to work with. I could write music in that [timeframe]. The other restriction in that project was that we... That was new for me because I had to construct it for a live performance, because we performed the music with the dance in the beginning, in the first run. And we could only have three people, whereas before I had been working with unlimited [time] and always thinking [about] the live performance afterwards.

So it was one of the first, at least, big pieces that I wrote for a specific number of people in mind and then had to work within that frame. Whereas Dreamland was a film that had big themes and big subjects, and we wanted the music to be quite expansive and orchestral in parts, and never really thinking about the live, if that music would be played live. Which it has been since quite a lot, and with orchestras of sizes from like 26 to 60. Those versions were created afterwards, but the project was built in this studio approach where I get small sections in and layered them together.

Aaron Gonsher

The sense of adaptability seems so important, in general... The ability to take this restriction and create something from it or have something very small and then build it out further and further. I think that threads through a lot of your work.

valgeir sigurðsson

Yeah, it does. This is one of the things that Nico and I, especially in the beginning when we were doing Speaks Volumes... His background being in the performance, ready for performance, and mine ready for studio, and then combining that, we then started making different versions of the pieces to perform with whoever was around. If Nadia was around to play the viola, then we would play certain pieces and then I would electronics. The electronics would maybe include half of the pre-recorded tracks, and I would figure out a way to make those electronics feel alive and interactive for me to not just stand there pressing a button. I think that reverse engineering, the recording and the writing, and crossing it in all ways possible was and is an important thing for my work.

Aaron Gonsher

I want to play something from Dreamland, the title track. I think I might butcher the title if I try to pronounce the Icelandic, Draumalandið. I guess that’s okay?

valgeir sigurðsson

That was pretty bad. No, that was pretty good, sorry. [laughs]

Aaron Gonsher

I warned you, but this is “Dreamland.”

(music: Valgeir Sigurðsson – “Draumalandið”)

So that was “Dreamland.” I think there’s an interesting environmental aspect to you making this score specifically that I sort of want to unpack because the film itself is about Alcoa, the former Aluminum Company of America, and their plants for aluminum or iron on the Icelandic coast?

valgeir sigurðsson

Yeah, the damming project that was in the east. Well, that’s kind of... Yeah, one of the, part of this film is about that. It’s based on a book that is about general exploitation of resources and of nature and corporations taking advantage of small communities, and how much do we value the land that we have, versus a short-term profit that we could make from one of these projects.

Aaron Gonsher

How do you translate something like that into music? Because it’s not just about writing to the film at that point. It’s very complex topics that you have to reflect musically in some way.

valgeir sigurðsson

I mean, you heard this dramatic piece of music there. The fun thing about working on that film was, it’s a lot of talking heads. A lot of people on both sides of the argument, for and against these projects and these dams. In between, you’re given time to consider a little bit what’s going on, what have these people been saying, and we see a lot of landscape, we see a lot of nature. Often, in these moments, the music was playing with those scenes. The sadness in it is that a lot of it is landscape and nature that has been drowned for creating these big dams.

I don’t know, I didn’t find it difficult at all to make music that illustrated that, that sadness, that tragedy in a way. I think it wasn’t a hard thing. It’s harder for me to write a happy piece of music than it is to write a sad piece of music.

Aaron Gonsher

Is that subject... When you think about Bedroom Community as being a label that is first of all based in Iceland on an island, and then has to create presumably a large amount of vinyl, which is a petroleum product. I’m curious if you’ve thought about that in relation to the label, after you had to have that experience thinking about it? In relation to the country overall.

valgeir sigurðsson

Yeah, obviously I think of it all the time. Lose sleep over it. It is what it is, I guess. We’re in kind of a weird time in history with all these sort of products. And music is moving into the digital world, which has no... Well, it probably does have a carbon footprint, in some ways that you have power-hungry hard drives everywhere, and so on. But this thing about manufacturing plastic and products made from fossil fuels is not something that we necessarily... I mean, if there was another way, I don’t think we’re gonna stop producing them while people still want them. And I love buying them, and I don’t think that vinyl is responsible for destroying the planet on its own.

Aaron Gonsher

I don’t think it is either, but I think it’s interesting to think about the context of that other film.

valgeir sigurðsson

It is, and I think that what kind of bothers me even more is all the shipping and freight and then the fact that we have to bring all this... We don’t manufacture it here, so we have to have stocks all over the world from different places. And the quantities are so low at this point of time, that you don’t have a plant in every territory to manufacture, and then you kind of help to get these copies out into the world, and the price doesn’t reflect the manufacturing cost and the shipping cost and so on. So it’s all kind of in a weird place right now.

Aaron Gonsher

I think your latest release also reflects being aware of these sorts of contradictions. It’s the album Dissonance, which actually last night, if you haven’t heard, won the Icelandic Music Award for Best Album. Dissonance was your first album in five years; it came out last year. What was happening during that period that made you want to move away from focusing on producing other people’s work so heavily, and pursue more of your solo compositions and really focus on that? Was there one thing in particular, or was it an accumulation of different experiences that you can talk about?

valgeir sigurðsson

It’s an accumulation for sure. But in that time it’s not like Dissonance came out five years after, and I didn’t make any music, write any music in the meantime. All that music took a long time to write. I think the earliest piece is probably an orchestral commission from 2011, 2012 maybe. I was writing much more music then, and kind of to the point where I didn’t even have the time to kind of put it into an album format or release it, or sort of put it in a context like that.

So actually, that’s a development that is both conscious, and I think a natural progression. And then I had, two-and-a-half years ago I had twins. So life kind of changes in the way that you appreciate the time that you have. And I’ve always wanted to... Actually, I forgot to tell you earlier that after I left, when I was leaving London, I actually applied to go to composition school. So I never got formal composition education. I learned how to read and write music playing guitar.

Aaron Gonsher

I think it ended up okay.

valgeir sigurðsson

Yeah I mean, I’m still making music, more music than ever before, so that’s fine. I just figured out my own way to do it. But so this was always the intention; it was always the direction. But I tend to kind of just do things on my own speed, and the reason for focusing less, putting the focus more into my writing music, and producing more with the closest collaborators on Bedroom Community is also it’s this time... Time is precious. And I feel like I’ve kind of done that enough for the moment.

Maybe I’ll get back into that role more heavily, I don’t know. I can’t see it at the moment. But it’s a very different energy, and you feel like you’re kind of organizing other people’s lives a lot of the time, and their thoughts and their emotions and their expectations. Bedroom Community operates in a slightly different way. The projects are usually always ongoing, and I kind of dip my toe into many during one week. I might touch, send updates and versions to the artist, I get feedback, and it sort of develops until the music is ready.

It might be like a week of intense recording, and then it sits on my hard drive and I work on it here and there. And a little bit how I work on my music as well. I might have a project that I have to put all my energy into, and then it goes somewhere, and then in the meantime I’m kind of working on six other things. And that’s just very much how I... So I like having these open conversations going and collaborations all the time, with all these different people, and writing for commissions and doing work in the theater, or film. This seems like how I enjoy making music at the moment.

Aaron Gonsher

And Dissonance as well was another piece of music that came from a concept in your head, before the actual process of composition started. Can you talk about what that was for the title track?

valgeir sigurðsson

Yes, the piece “Dissonance” is based on 45 seconds of a Mozart string quartet.

Aaron Gonsher

How long is the string quartet total, the original?

valgeir sigurðsson

It’s under ten minutes, but this is the first of four movements. And it’s an interesting piece, because it’s so different to everything that he had written. If you listen to it, it sounds a lot more like Shostakovich, something much closer in time. That’s why it was called the name “Dissonance” quartet, because you were not really used to at that time, hearing those. But it moves very fast in the original, and when I heard it for the first time I love how these dissonant chords come together really quickly and then resolve into something more kind of consistent.

And I wanted to kind of expand these moments. I wanted to live them, and sit in them for minutes at a time. So I just took the score and I stretched it to about, I think it plays at about 2 BPM something like that. So it’s 23 minutes, the piece now. No, 11 BPM was what we figured out that we recorded it at. It was lower than the computer could go, so we had to divide it. I think we did it at 22. It would only go down to 20 BPM. So that was basically the starting point for the piece. Just kind of exploding these bars and sustaining those moments, and kind of reconstructing the piece.

With Liam Byrne, who is the viola da gamba player that I built the piece with. He plays all the strings on the piece, and we did layers and layers and layers of him playing for 25 minutes at a time. So it took many, many days to get all the layers in. And sometimes we discovered that we had to re-do a layer, because when it was sitting against something else, something new then or maybe a part of a layer we had to kind of re-do.

And then my process after that, after the recording was to shape it again... The dynamics, which one of these 20 something layers, what was the most prominent one? What was the kind of chords, what was the lead? So on. And reprocess them, re-amping them into guitar amps and distorting.

Aaron Gonsher

Do you find yourself being more interested in that sort of sprawl nowadays, as opposed to concision? Or do you not think there’s really a distinction between them and it was just the case for this one?

valgeir sigurðsson

Well, I think these longform pieces, I’m more comfortable with them for sure. But, I don’t know. I think it goes both ways really.

Aaron Gonsher

What makes you more comfortable with them?

valgeir sigurðsson

I think it’s just that I think I have a better understanding. I can see kind of further and into the future when starting a piece that is that long. And actually playing it live. We played it a lot, just the two of us live. It actually kind of makes you understand the piece and rediscover it in a way. And the fun thing for me when I play it live is that I’m always reworking the dynamics of it, and it can go many ways. And I think it can sound... At least to me, it can sound quite different from one performance to the next.

Aaron Gonsher

Let’s listen to a few minutes of this. This is "Dissonance" from 2017.

(music: Valgeir Sigurðsson — “Dissonance”)

So that’s the first five minutes of the 22 minutes. You should go listen to it if you haven’t, and I think that beautiful piece of music is actually a good ending point. So thank you very much for coming out today. We’re gonna open it up to a Q&A if people have questions. There should be a microphone that’s floating around. Or if not, you can just feel free to shout out the question yourself if you so desire. [points to someone in audience] Do you mind waiting for the mic?

Audience Member

Hi, thank you. I was just wondering regarding structure, structures of song and the music you make, what is your kind of approach to structure?

valgeir sigurðsson

Yeah, structure is very important for me. But I don’t know that I have a clear answer, because I think I always rely on my instincts. And one of the challenges is with kind of longer pieces, is that I think the journey has to make sense, and it can be tricky to see if the structure is good or bad. Looking at it, you kind of have to be able to zoom out, and yeah, that’s my only answer.

Audience Member

Thanks.

Aaron Gonsher

Was there anyone else?

Audience Member

I actually have a question.

Aaron Gonsher

Go for it.

Audience Member

How important are reference tracks for you during mixing and mastering?

valgeir sigurðsson

I guess less and less. You can learn a lot from listening to... If you’re just thinking about the mastering process, or the mixing of the track, then of course it helps to have something that you know is tried and tested, and you listen to it in your car, and you listen to it in the club, and you listen to it on the radio, and you listen to it on your laptop speakers and, “This always sounds good.” So you can measure things up against it.

But then I guess I hardly ever use them anymore. But I think I used to, just to convince myself that I couldn’t get this any further. “There can’t be any more bass than this. This can’t be louder, this can’t be…” Yeah, so but then actually I mean my reference tracks, they tend to be my stuff that I worked on. Because also I can kind of very easily, or more easily I can analyze it in my head, and I can remember what the process was. For example, I think By the Throat, Ben Frost’s album, I think we mastered that five times or something. And in my opinion, it’s a mastering that I think brought us much to the way the record sounds as the mixing. I mixed it as well, but the mastering actually kind of really pushed it forward, and that’s an album that I go back to sometimes.

Aaron Gonsher

If there’s not anyone else, then we’ll wrap up. But thank you again for joining us today, really appreciate it.

valgeir sigurðsson

Thanks for having me.